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This is a great koan. But, like many koans, it's a seductive meditation because it's predicated on the impossible. Or so I think.

The cosmos is silent. Not silent the way that we can be, if we choose, that is, silent in relation to another (speaking) state. That which we call the cosmos, when we speak, has no language. We flatter ourselves by describing it and parsing it in our words, but it has no need of that game, no interest in it, no "understanding". We flatter ourselves (again) by pitying those without "understanding" and we can romanticize Nature and ascribe to her (her!) all kinds of reasons for her silence, characteristics, motives, traits...even a kind of knowing. Perhaps because, compared to us, she (she!) is so big where we are so small, so nurturing where we are cruel, and so cruel, it seems to us, where we are so "human".

All of this describing the natural world in words is a charlatan's game -- if we pretend that the koan has an *answer*. Whatever we want to name it, the cosmos, the world, Nature, the universe, reality, "it all", we need to recall that names themselves are merely for our convenience and for our (false) comfort. As Wittgenstein might have said, that which *is*, apart from our language, passes over us in silence.

There are, I think, rare and wondrous moments in which we can feel ourselves at one with this silence, and we are then, maybe, in the cosmos itself, unencumbered and unsupported by the language we use to separate ourselves from the silence.